Going Buggy II

One clear indicator of the change was what I wore to the hospital. When my trouble first began, I wore maternity jeans to the ER. That was April 1989. When our Mathew was born on October 30th, wearing sweatpants to go home felt inappropriate to me. Things had changed within and without.

Photo: Douglas Hoover

The library book we wore out was called Amish Society by John A. Hostetler. He gave plenty of cultural information, but the hook for us was the scripture references he gave. We kept putting the book down to pick up our Bibles. What we found was life-changing. The history of the Anabaptist movement and the scriptures that fed it was very convicting for both of us. We began to marvel at the odds of both of us being convicted the same way at the same time. It had to be a God thing. https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/amish-society

To leave the Catholic church was not even an option at first. We were not devout but were raised in the mindset taught by most traditional churches, you don’t leave. The more we read, the more we observed of the plain people, the clearer we could feel conviction taking over. Two other books came into play, David Bercot’s Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up the other was The Martyrs Mirror by Thieleman J. van Braght. These two books also sent us back to our Bibles to reconsider what the Lord was doing in our lives.

https://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/more-heretics.html

We also read The Budget, a national newspaper for the plain community. In my next post, I will relate how we got involved with the Amish because of The Budget. The irony of this is that I ended up writing for them for ten years as a ‘scribe’ for my Amish congregation in Michigan.

If you have an interest in Amish culture, read your Bible, especially Mt. 5-7. That really tells the tale. We joined the New Order Amish of Holmes County, OH in 1991 and they as well as the Michigan Amish Fellowship churches took us in like family (for better or for worse sometimes). We will start that leg of the journey next.

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